Autumn Leaves
by there's no time
Summary: This story is what I think would immediately happen to Faye and Jet after the end of the series. Includes lots of action in the second half. Contains spoilers for the last two sessions of Cowboy Bebop.
1. A sudden chill

Spoilers: If you haven't seen the last few sessions of this series, don't read this or it'll spoil it.

"The effect of settling in space decades ago wrought changes in the human psyche," the doctor tells a camera somewhere in a studio a vast distance away from here. Jet is on the couch in his ship the Bebop, waiting for something, with a cigarette burning down between his metal fingers. His head is turned away, staring to the left of the tv feed on the table before him. The only light is from the screen, and it covers Jet in its flickering glow. He wears only his boxer shorts and an undershirt. Beside him on the couch are his pants and a sewing kit. Since the bandages came off his thigh, he's needed to sew up the pant leg Spike had ripped off after Jet got shot in that bar.

The ship is freezing.

His back hurts in the position he's in, with his legs up on the table, and his one arm with the flesh and blood intact slung along the back of the couch. With eyes half shut he observes nothing. Space outside the Bebop is cold and strange. If water were suddenly released into the vast vacuum out there, it would not freeze. Instead it would initially boil upon first contact. Jet learned that from the same tv he is not watching now.

His upper body stretches and tenses with a yawn that makes his eyes water.

"For once," the doctor on tv says to the camera, "human beings finally realized it is just us out here. No aliens or other civilizations, just us and everything that comes with us."

"There is nothing but each other."

Sleep takes over, finally, as soon as he hears the hangar opening. The cigarette winks out between his unfeeling fingers. He feels someone putting a blanket over him later, but is too tired to stir.

--

When Jet wakes up he walks into a scene. He doesn't mean to, but it happens anyway. Predictably, it starts out when he goes to find Faye. While slipping through the ship in his newly repaired clothes, he notices the old scuffs and dents left by the shoes of another crew member who used to live here. He's gone now, and he's not coming back. The corridors are chilly and smell like stale cigarettes. He expects Spike is just around every corner in the ship, but he is disappointed to find only rough remnants of his existence as he moves from empty room to empty room.

He finds Faye in her room in near-darkness. She's putting clothes into a new designer bag. Designed for travel. She covers a white poker chip with the edge of a sock as she sees him in the doorway.

The sounds of Faye packing fill him with cold shock. She's reminding him of sleepless nights spent under the sheets of his bed on Ganymede, his old home, after a long shift on the police force that had left his senses overflowing with the sights and smells of desperation and terror in the streets.

As he sprawled in bed late into the night, the very start of the dawnless morning hours would always be heralded by the cruel song of birds somewhere in the dark. The birdsong filled him with dread at the coming of the sleepless day, with no hope of rest, with nothing to look forward to but a lonely pot of coffee and everyone around him rousing from their dreams to join him in his wakefulness. And now listening to Faye was like hearing those unwelcome birds all over again.

Jet speaks to her in song titles, his favorite language.

" 'Autumn Leaves'," Jet says.

"What? Jet?" Faye spins towards him as if noticing him for the first time. She's wearing a stylish powder blue outfit that covers her, head to toe.

"It's an old jazz song. The mystery is, no one knows if it's about falling leaves, or a girl named Autumn who is escaping something."

"Maybe it's both."

"What happens when Autumn leaves?" Jet asks her.

"Winter comes. That's easy."

"Easy come, easy go," Jet murmurs. He quits crowding her doorway and heads back to find his cigarettes. As he goes up the stairs, his knees crick and groan. He winces remembering what happened just a few days earlier between them.

---

He had gotten spectacularly drunk from the whiskey he'd brought on the ship, and was soon confused by the noises coming from the bathroom. He thought Faye had left the ship for a shopping spree. Then who was in the bathroom? Grasping at conclusions, Jet stumbled towards the bathroom door.

He walked right in on Faye while she was lounging in the bathtub. Their eyes met in the bright uncompromising light of the bathroom, and in a slow moment, comprehension dawned. She shrieked loud enough to make Jet bite his tongue in surprise.

"Lock it next time!" he bellowed, tasting blood in his mouth. He slammed the door.

"I thought you were Ein!" she yelled at him after he'd shut the door. "Not like he's here anymore…"

"I thought you were Spike," he said inaudibly, with a low laugh out of his whiskey-burned throat that wasn't really laughing at all.

--

Jet dreams about having his next cigarette, and when he wakes up, he has one. Jet's dreams are simple. Other people he's known have had bad dreams, and good dreams, and dreams in between. Spike coveted a dream too, Jet knows, but that's all it was. It was just a dream that could not be willed into reality. And that, he tells himself, is why he is gone now. To think like that helps Jet have simple dreams. He's got a not-quite healed wound on his leg that reminds him otherwise, but as living on the Bebop proves, wrap enough bandages over your pain and it'll be healed, somehow.

_The only reason Faye would want to leave is she wants to stay, if you understand the logic of a woman like that_, Jet is thinking as he navigates through multiple message platforms on the net. There's a thread that's caught his eye the last few days. A hysterical net diver is spamming one of the forums about a famous crew of bounty hunters who's just lost half of their team, and so all the bounty money they've collected is on their ship somewhere, fragile and unprotected and ripe for attack. Equipment hums around him, like maddening persistent mosquitoes in his ears.

Frequently, as he's deleting the posts using a few tricks he knows, Jet fantasizes about tracking down the net diver and how easy it'd be to teach him something about shutting up, but it seems pointless. While mulling over the other precautions he's taken he wonders if he should warn Faye or if she'll be gone by the time anyone out there decides to act on Hysterical Net Diver's advice. His hands are poised over the keyboard like a piano player as he coaxes the program into his will. "Come on baby, don't be like that," he mumbles. It beeps at him. "Ah, good girl," he responds, smiling.

"Bounty hunting is so boring, Jet," Faye says in an echo, clomping down the corridor out of sight. She emerges into the room and swings herself around to the other side of the couch, where she falls in a huff. She stares at the ceiling fan above as it whirs. Agonizing minutes pass.

"So's being alone," he responds finally, his words mechanical, while not looking up.

"Being together is boring too."

"That makes you damned hard to please. There's nothing glamorous out there. Believe me, I know," Jet rants. "Just a lot of rocks and people you have to catch. It's gotten to where you can't tell the good from the bad anymore." His hands fly up into the air. One flutters to his side, the other clunks home onto the back of the couch.

"This ship, it's too small for us both. It's too small, and it's too big. I gotta go."

"And go where? And do what?"

"You've forgotten how resourceful I am. And it's more fun to be spontaneous. You don't have to parent me, you know."

"So when?"

"Well… Right after you make dinner. Ship's all packed." She looks down at her fingernails.

Jet just laughs. _Don't parent her, really now._ Inside his heart goes a little cold. It was sooner than he'd imagined. Before he'd ever taken anyone on to the Bebop to work with him, he had spent five years collecting bounties alone. Most of those years he had needed the solitude. He thought he deserved it, a self-inflicted purgatory for the weight of all his sins. That was until some stray cats showed up.

As he is grating out the sound of his laughter, a buzzer from somewhere begins to ring.

"We have company, Faye."

"How wonderful. You sound delighted. What's the big deal? That buzzer goes off all the time." While she lights a cigarette he explains the mounting evidence that someone, maybe a lot of someones, might be after all their rumored bountiful riches.

She takes one puff and they stand up together. She's eye to eye with Jet who's cracking his one set of knuckles. She stretches out her arms over her head and yawns.

"Gonna need my gun, I guess," she says, watching him.

"Hurry up and get it, and get in your ship, then," he says. He stares at her in the eyes for a long moment. Her expression uncontrollably changes to underscore the indelible childhood Jet sees in her.

"It's all right, Faye," he tells her quietly. He crosses his arms. "Ed left without a goodbye, too." His mouth is dry and tastes like copper. He is cold with dread; a pit of it collapsing in his stomach, as he clenches his jaw, trying to force away what loneliness will feel like again.

The buzzer continues to bleat out a warning, until its mechanical pattern silences it. She looks away, startled by the silence. Suddenly she breaks from his side and dashes out of the room. He turns to follow.

"All we even have is your whiskey and the money we got from Doohan for selling the Swordfish!" she yells in a frustrated rage as they part in the corridor.

"Try telling them that," he growls. He's thinking, surely, she won't leave after this. She'll see: that alone out here, no one can survive long. The buzzer goes off. The sequence ends and begins again.


	2. Like leaves fall

"TEN SHIPS! You have to be KIDDING me!"

The coms crackle as Faye responds to Jet's relaying of the scan findings.

"They're just zip crafts and they're low on fuel, probably from trying to find us," Jet tells her. "Just use your soft touch to call them off, Faye."

"I know what to do," she snaps. "I hope you've stocked up on bullets in there," she says in a hurry, as the doors to the hangar open. As she waits for her path to clear she pulls on an old pair of fingerless gloves, made for the hard work the hands do when controlling a ship at high speed. They're too big, because they used to belong to Spike.

One moment everything is sane with her wheels on the floor of the hangar. Life is rosey with an up, a down, a left, a right, even an upside down, which can be chaotic but is preferable to the instant 'merry-go-round to hell' feeling that accompanies navigation in her little monopod. Everything jolts as her wheels leave the nice steady ground.

Involuntarily every muscle in Faye's stomach clenches in compensation for the feeling of directional ambiguity. The display tells her right where she is but she's never quite convinced. She leans over the controls – the seat is very cold, as is everything she touches - and blasts the craft towards the little glints of light reflecting in the sun that are now getting much closer.

Jet is sending her more scan info. Three of the ships carry missiles; she'll have to focus the most on them. If she can get another two to follow her away where she can take them out one by one without endangering the Bebop, Jet should be able to handle the other five. She hopes.

Faye asks her zipcraft what's around she can use. A gate into hyperspace is nearby. This is a lucky development. She flaunts her presence to the fleet of ships ahead. She knows they'll think she's making off with all the money they're after, especially since she's heading towards the gate, as if to escape. Or they know she's luring them, and they don't care, they just want to get rid of her. Either way, she's happy.

In a burst of speed, she directs her ship into the funhouse entrance, pleased to see that half the ships – two of which are carrying missiles – are following her. The controls are hot to the touch now. The ship's had its warm up. Now it's time to dance.

As soon as the five tailers enter the gate, one of them locks on with a missile just to see what she'll do. She ignores it and continues ahead, faking ignorance. The missile is fired. Faye watches it approach on screen. She decides to let them know who they're dealing with.

Faye's got no idea how it works, but there's ways to manipulate hyperspace. On her ship, Faye has a built in device that sends out an electric current all over the outer metal. It works as a theft-control measure and a very poor force field. So, she flips it on and steers over to the side of the gate.

The electric current from her ship touches the gate's invisible edge, and electrocutes it. Faye concentrates on holding the ship steady so it doesn't careen into the side. The missile has followed Faye's ship over to the side of the gate. It gets a little too close. The electric current surges through the missile.

Instead of exploding, the missile just slows down and then stops completely in mid-path. It's attached to the electricity and the hyperspace leaking into the current, wrapping itself around the missile in a mother's hug between hyperspace and reality. To the ship that fired it, it looks like the missile has just disappeared, the likely reason being that it's a cheap missile and it failed to impact.

All Faye has to do is wait for the other ships to get too close. They're approaching very fast now, as they think Faye isn't smart enough to avoid them.

"Too bad," Faye says, and as warnings begin to nag on the screen, she kills the power to the electric current, and turns full power over to the engines to accelerate away.

The missile detonates in a catastrophic ball of kinetic energy and explosive charge, safely behind Faye but taking out two of the ships behind her, which careen out of control and disintegrate into a million white snowballs of fire.

Faye's ship communicator begins to beep. Her pursuers are contacting her for some reason. She flips it on to accept, out of bemusement.

"Toe-hold a sailboat bored the terrible," a woman on screen mumbles.

"You smoke too much," Faye says back, dismissing her. She kills the communicator with a quick flick of the wrist and fires up power to her own missiles.

She takes a hard turn, as close to 360 as possible, 390 if she can get it. She feels her body twist with the circling and she hangs on to the hand controls to stay steady. Get turned around_, _she thinks somewhere in her brain that tells her how to do this instinctively, so it seems to require no thought.

A random question enters her mind, but there's no time to answer it. After this is over, what then?

Hard right, flip, turn and zero in. A little green triangle comes up on her ship's screen as delicate and precise as a Victorian table setting. The targeted ship begins to maneuver away and then targets her right back with a missile. It's fired and heading at her, but not before Faye gets a shot. Trigger finger. They exchange missiles.

The beeping warning increases with every second to tell her how much time she has until impact. Seven seconds. She's already locked on to the missile as she flies upward away from it. Five seconds. Firing her twin guns at it, she strains to control the ship with one hand while working the trigger with the other. Two seconds. She finally shoots it down in a bouquet of flame. The ship she fired at was not so lucky, and it explodes as Faye's missile hits its target. That was too easy. Where are the other two ships? She zips away from the falling and exploding ship ahead.

"Rrrrrrrghh—" A hard left. Buzzers begin to scream, and she's been locked onto.

They're both firing at me, she realizes. With a hard slide she stares down the bullets as they whir past. She can't let them hit her. All her stuff is in the ship right now. She had packed it, and there wasn't time to remove it before she took off. It's expensive stuff, she thinks, really trendy gear, and she was going to be outraged if any of it got hurt. It was easier to think of this little melee as defending her stuff than defending her life. Picturing her suitcase with a bullet hole through it, she digs in and puts all the chips out.

Somehow with a combination of insane steering and luck she emerges from their attack unscathed. She takes a gulp of air, having forgotten to breathe while getting out of that last bit of trouble. They're attempting to push her into a corner and let the sides of the gate take her out for them. Apparently the money she may or may not have no longer matters. Maybe it's revenge they want, for surprising the hell out of them and taking out three of their comrades.

She sprays some bullets around from her twin guns, a hysterical move which seems to make the two ship pilots hesitate. She twists and turns, feeling the controls hot against her hands even through the gloves, to maneuver into position to get a weapon locked on. Her ship must resemble a piñata being pummeled and jarred in every direction.

She's actually locked onto both of them. It's unbelievable. But they've turned and are heading back the way they came to the opening of the gate. They're running from her. She powers down her weapons. No reason to waste perfectly good missiles… but what could have caused that?

A flash catches her eye on her console: a message, left there for her to find. She cues it up and Jet's disembodied voice haunts her monopod.

"At the end of 'Autumn Leaves' there's a little piano solo… I wish you could have heard it. Everything stops and it becomes so mournful, like someone has come along and found out that Autumn is gone. Someone actually did care for her, and he's sad she's left him… You can see him standing in the doorway not finding her, in the song, looking out over a lonely room they once shared. But then the bass kicks back in and the saxophone offers its condolences, and the song goes on without her…"

It clicks off as she sits back, stunned. In a few moments she emerges from the gate and takes a look around to see how Jet fared.


	3. Blackest night

_Bullets. Hah. _Jet considers Faye's last transmission and has to chuckle a bit. He's got bullets, sure. He's got exactly six of them. He loads the gun, fingers of one hand passing over the rough 'RESTRICTED FOR LAW ENFORCEMENT USE MADE IN ITALY" inscription on the magazine. There's room for three more slugs but that's all he's got, so he loads and holsters it.

The attackers have hacked into the Bebop's computer and opened the hangar doors, an easy task since Edward wasn't around to create new security blocks. Five people are boarding his ship right this moment. Every damned buzzer ever installed in the corners of the ship is screaming it. Even the alarm clocks are going off, and Jet is standing in his room, gun holstered, watering his bonsai trees.

The lights flicker out, in tune with the delay Jet put on them. It's as dark as starless space inside the ship now. Jet flips on his dual night-vision, infrared goggles and puts the watering can down with a clang – silence hardly matters now. In a few minutes the buzzers will quit too, as he'd programmed them.

Jet involuntarily grins in anticipation. His armored boots are gone; with icy bare feet he treads through his room.

His door is open before him. He pokes his nose out, using his peripheral vision to scan the hall. 

They're late.

From the hangar he hears a hissing noise - some kind of gas. He ducks back into his room and retrieves a mask to filter it out. Looking like an alien who can't withstand the pitch black, unbreathable atmosphere with his mask and goggles, he runs out of the hallway and with a quick slide, ends up in front of the couch on his side to wait for the door to the hangar to open. Jet begins to grind his teeth in anticipation. The buzzers all suddenly stop.

The sound of the door opening fills the heavily silent room.

When this fight is over, Jet thinks while on his back looking at the ceiling, Faye will leave and he will have to move on, like water spilling down a creek after a bauble of rocks.

Or maybe she'll stay?

Jet wonders what she'd do if he got killed today. She certainly wouldn't take care of his bonsai trees. She'd sell the Bebop, probably. Sell everything he has left. Down to the whiskey. Down to his last six bullets.

So he better be sure to spend them all, his last bit of earthly currency.

Someone takes a step into the room. Jet springs up from behind the couch and stands before the figure entering his ship. With the goggles, he can see the heat signature of a man crouched in the entryway. Jet leans around the side of the couch and fires once, trying to conserve his spare ammo.

Five bullets left, and from the pooling heat trail of blood leading from his now slumped first target, four more intruders to stop. Now that the element of surprise is lost, Jet can't stay where he is; an old couch is not much cover. Jet jumps up and runs bent over towards the hall leading to his room.

"Go to hell!" he hears a woman's voice sob. Then the hangar door slams shut.

Jet's not willing to let them go. It sounds like they're going to leave but that's not going to work. He huffs in frustration at a dead run to the door, and is soon standing in the blood he'd spilled minutes before. It's a good thing for the stickiness reminding him he isn't wearing his boots. He had been mere seconds from kicking the unlatched door in, and he probably would've broken every bone in his foot. Wincing at the thought, Jet forces himself to try some finesse.

With his metal arm he eases the door open with no resistance. Back to the wall, he takes a deep breath, and then removes his goggles. He sets them to record, and then with his metal hand sticks them into the hangar. After a few moments, he pulls them back and sets them back to their normal mode. Watching the recording, he sees there's three people hiding behind one of their ships, and another sprawled on the ground, bleeding. The figure of a woman kneels over the hurt man. One of the men behind the ships has a weird heat signature, like there's something wrong with his body temperature.

A couple shots ring off the metal near Jet, and one careens through the open hangar door. With the advantage of his goggles, Jet jumps through the door when they're done firing and heads right for his ship, the Hammerhead, and dives behind it for cover. In all the darkness, no one even sees where he goes.

A woman's voice cuts through the darkness. The voice is muffled by the gas mask she wears.

"Dad, dad, wake up," she whispers. "I'm going to take him and get him some help."

"Shut up! Pick up your gun, or you don't get any of the money from this job!" a man's voice echoes.

"I don't care about that anymore!" she replies. A man in the shadow of a ship walks out over to her and pistol-whips her across the chin. She never sees him, and falls down next to her father.

Just a bunch of amateurs, Jet thinks. Punks.

"I can't see anything in these goggles," a short man says.

"What are you talking about?!" The apparent ringleader, standing over the woman he knocked unconscious, turns around and snatches the goggles forcibly from the head of the complainer.

"You don't even have them turned on," he hisses.

Jet's got his breath back now and he's had enough of this absurdity. He carefully aims from behind the Hammerhead, with the use of his own goggles. He takes a shot, allows time for the recoil to lightning through his arm, and then dives back down for cover. The goggles in the hands of the group's leader shatter as Jet's bullet tears through them. The three remaining men hysterically waste a couple dozen bullets trying to find the source of the shot.

Four bullets left.

"Damnit, someone is in here! Marnie, get up in that ship and turn on the floodlights already!" The short man dashes up one of the five ships they crammed into the hanger, but Jet lets him have it. Marnie falls to the floor in a crash.

Three.

"Lay down your guns," Jet announces, standing outside of any cover. "You don't know what you're –" a spray of bullets silences him, and he springs backwards to cover behind the Hammerhead. They're way off target and come from the leader of the little group, which is slowly being decimated in the darkness.

Enough of this, Jet thinks. Holstering his gun, Jet lunges at the leader, just in time for the other man left to hit the floodlights in one of the ships. Before the leader can even yelp, Jet connects with his metal fist, right in his opponent's gut. The wind knocked out of him, the man doubles over on the floor in pain. He's reaching for his gun wildly, but Jet kicks it gingerly out of reach with the side of his foot. The goggles are useless now, so Jet pulls them off quickly and looks down at the prostrate man. He's just a young guy, with a blond mohawk, covered in tattoos visible on his back and chest through his mesh shirt. A slight line of blood trails from his mouth and into his gas mask, which has fallen off.

The ship in front of Jet goes slightly up and down on its wheels. Jet notices it just in time to look up, where the last man standing is jumping down on him. He tackles Jet and tries to wrap his fingers around Jet's throat. Using his metal arm, Jet puts all the strength the artificial limb has in tightening his fingers around his attacker's throat. Lying there on the ground, Jet realizes he can't breathe at all. The man choking him has cut off his air completely. Jet looks around wildly, then sees that both of his attacker's arms are like his own metal limb.

His gaze searches the cold, emotionless gray eyes of his attacker. Jet realizes he's just wrapped his metal fingers around the round body armor that goes all the way to the man's chin. Jet kicks wildly in a last minute effort to survive. Everything begins to swim in his vision until he collects every bit of remaining air and strength to swing his fist into the man's face.

The pressure on Jet's throat relents slightly, so Jet punches him again and again with both fists, until his vision starts to spot and turn black. Finally the man falls backward. Jet slides away, breathing haggardly, pulling his gun. But the man has jumped up and dashed out the door of the hangar into the inner living quarters of the Bebop. Jet tears off the gas mask and gasps for air. Whatever they set off in here has since dissipated.

He's young, so young to have lost both arms already, and too young to have learned how to properly control them, Jet thinks as he half-crawls to cover behind the Hammerhead. He's got to catch his breath before doing anything else. He climbs inside the Hammerhead in case the main hangar doors open and a ship comes in; it'd be just too much to suffocate in space after being nearly suffocated by some punk kid boarding his ship without an invitation.

Looking down from the windows of the Hammerhead, he can see his bloody footprints on the floor and the three bodies lying down there, not moving. His Hammerhead is full of bullet holes. It's a big mess that could have been avoided, and it was just going to get messier.


	4. Steeling for winter

Jet studies his right fist, which is now bloodied from pounding it into the face of his attacker. With effort, he climbs out of the Hammerhead in time to notice the girl who'd been knocked out earlier is now awake, and supporting her father as they move slowly towards one of their ships. Hearing the sound of the Hammerhead opening, the girl turns and her eyes lock with Jet's. She says nothing, but bites her lip with the expression of a woman desperate enough to take on anything in her way. Seeing her in the light now, he memorizes her features: dark black hair, cut short, slight build, green eyes.

"…His name is Dylan Augusto. Both of his eyes are cybernetic, both arms, and his knees. Most of his skull is too. He's ex-military. I hope you kill him, now will you let us go?"

"Yeah. Just go," Jet tells her, climbing down and heading for the hangar door. She stares back at him in unconcealed astonishment. "There's a doctor pretty close I know, I can send you the coordinates –"

"Don't worry about it." She hefts her father into the ship. Jet notices the unconscious figure of the ringleader in the mohawk, and bends to move him out of the way so he's not swept into space when the hangar is opened.

"I wish we hadn't come here," she says, watching him. "The guy on the net said you'd surrender. I – I didn't know--"

"Which guy?"

"I'll send you the coordinates."

"How will I know who to accept them from?"

"Name's Bonnie. Bonnie Augusto," she says, and slams the ship door down.

As Jet puts the ringleader down inside and turns the wheeled airlock on the door to the hangar, standing in the Bebop's living quarters in the dark with his goggles back on, he thinks back to the pang of emotion he'd felt seeing Bonnie help her father across the tarmac to the ship. He forced it back down, replacing it with cold disinterest, just as the nerves in the body could be replaced with cool metal unfettered by feeling, repurposed like his metal limb. Everything else was to be ignored for now, with one more uninvited man left on his ship, and he had to take care of him, because for all he knew, Faye was in trouble.

Or maybe she'd already left, something far more likely.

He hears the ship in the hangar take off. Once the sound quits echoing, he pulls his gun and double-checks how much ammo he has left. Three bullets, as he'd counted.

That's when everything gradually goes completely dark, as if the oxygen in the Bebop had been depleted and he was losing consciousness quickly. Jet panics for a split second, then sheepishly realizes the batteries in his goggles have died, leaving him blind. Amid his cursing he remembers that the man he's hunting has cybernetic eyes, making Jet extremely vulnerable in the darkness.

Someone bumps into him in the dark and Jet jumps away, only to realize the man he dragged inside the Bebop had regained consciousness. With a grunt of irritation, Jet reaches his hand out, clamps him on the back, steers him to the door and tosses him into the hangar.

"Pick a ship and get out! And if you steal any fuel, I will hunt you down!" he yells at the dazed man, who doesn't even look back before Jet slams the door shut again.

Priority one: get the lights back on, Jet thinks. He stands at the door and shuts his eyes. He takes a deep breath. Before his mind's eye a picture of the Bebop as it looks in the light appears. It is empty of anyone else, and even has a haze of cigarette smoke. He moves towards his room against the wall, listening to the ship harder than he ever has before. The mosquito buzzing of the machinery around him becomes a flat out roar in his ears. He can hear the scuttling of cockroaches, which normally hide from the light but now have no fear of darkness, and are impossible to get rid of on any space-going vessel.

He resists the urge to open his eyes, knowing the darkness will be so deep that it's pointless. He hopes Augusto hasn't shot up or somehow destroyed the switches in his room that bring the lighting back online. At the very least, there is a high-powered flashlight in his room, and he'd just recharged the batteries in it.

He can't hear any sign of Dylan Augusto, who could be in any part of the ship. Quietly he slides into his room, when suddenly there is the cold steel of a firearm against his neck. Jet is tense and ready this time, falling down in a crouch, pulling his own weapon. They both fire at other at once, the room filling with the thunderous sound and flashing light from their weapons, and Jet feels the familiar tear of hot metal through his skin. Right through his good arm, high up. But it doesn't hurt yet, and Jet lunges for the lights. The scent of gunpowder stings his nose.

Two bullets left.

The lights slowly flicker on and Jet sees Augusto's surprise, and taking advantage of it, he runs at him and tackles him. They fall into Jet's bonsai plants, water and dirt flying up and into Jet's face. Augusto recovers and kicks him off.

Frantically, Jet tries to clear his vision. He fires one more bullet at Augusto, and sees it hit him in the shoulder. Augusto barely flinches as it goes through his metal skin.

"How sad, old man," Augusto tells him. "Nothing you can do will stop me."

With one bullet left, Jet aims at the grinning man. The trigger causes no reaction from the gun; no light, no sound, just clicks.

"A misfire. That's too bad for you. Now give me your all your bounty earnings and I'll let you live, old man," Augusto tells him, as he levels his own gun at Jet's head.

Jet's eyes drop from Augusto's; he stares down at his gun. With a quick movement he removes the last unfired bullet from the gun and looks down at it, then tosses it away. Still holding the gun, Jet searches for the source of the bleeding from his gunshot arm, then presses the back of his metal hand on it to slow it down.

"Can you just explain something to me, Augusto? Why all the machinery, man? You got more metal in you than blood, looks to me."

"That's obvious, isn't it? I can live forever, the more mechanical I get. No one'll stop me. They don't even try. Why are you asking me? You've got a graft right there."

"I lost my arm in an accident."

Augusto laughs. "That's a really sad story. Yeah, that's pretty pathetic. Too bad you didn't go in for more. It feels great. No one can touch you."

"Who's Bonnie? Is that your father she just flew off with, bleeding to death? She your sister?"

"Was my sister," Augusto replies, his smile falling a bit. "I'm a new man now. Got different priorities."

"I can help her and your father –"

"All right, enough stalling. Where's the bounty money?"

"There isn't any. That guy on the net lied. You came out here for nothing."

"That's crap. You're going to bleed to death stalling like that." He was right. It was now or never. Jet tosses the handgun at Augusto to startle him, then retreats through his door. A bullet ricochets off the frame as Jet stumbles in his bare feet back towards the hangar, where he hoped to lure Augusto in an attempt to somehow open the hangar, catch Augusto off guard, and let him get sucked into space. It was doomed to fail but was the last recourse Jet could think of.

Augusto chases after him, yelling, but Jet can't focus on the words, slowly losing his grip as he loses more blood. A gunshot bristles him, and Jet assumes he's dead or dying. There's no pain; he can't feel anything. Everything goes black as Jet falls to the floor.


	5. Epilogue

Jet wakes up covered in sunlight. It's far too warm and too bright, and there's intense pain, which Jet is not prepared for. Slowly he becomes used to it, and tries to get his bearings. Faye is next to him, indicating that he possibly is not dead.

"Faye?"

"Jet! God, you're finally awake. I've been reading the same magazine article for two hours. Now maybe we can get out of here."

"Where is here?"

"A hospital. I had to bring you in here, I know we can't afford it but I didn't have much choice. You were in bad shape, you know?" Faye flips her hair back dismissively and stares at her fingernails.

"What happened?" Jet relaxes back into his hospital bed a little, and focuses his gaze towards the windows at his side. He pulls his blanket down and away from his chest, sweating a little in the afternoon sunlight blazing down on him.

"I shot down three of the ships that came after me, then the last two took off. It was really rude of them! So I went after them, and then another ship came out of the Bebop. They all three flew off, so I tried to com you but as usual, you didn't respond. I went and landed in the hangar, walked into the ship and some guy was trying to kill you, so I shot him. He's dead," she tells him quickly, like she's reading racing results.

"Damn," Jet says after a minute. "If you hadn't come along…"

"I wouldn't have to clean up the mess you left! There's blood everywhere, I hope you don't think I'm going to clean it up, because it's not my mess. At least you didn't trash anything in my room, that's a miracle."

"There wasn't anything in there to mess up. You packed it up, remember?"

"Well, that's true… I put it all back though… for storage until you get better, can't have you all messed up on your own like this."

"Oh, I see. So that's how it goes, huh," he replies. "I wonder what the excuse will be next week?"

"Excuse?"

"Excuse for you to stay," he explains.

"Hey, if you don't want me to take care of your messed up ass, I won't, okay," Faye says, standing up. Jet takes her shoulder in his metal hand and sits her back down in her chair. She smiles at his silly gesture.

"Well…" he begins.

"I hate to tell you, but your bonsai trees got smashed up pretty bad." She looks up into his eyes to see his reaction. Jet winces at the news, then wordlessly turns his head to stare at the window. Faye continues to look at him, and he catches her a minute later.

"I – I wanted to avoid the police, but they got involved anyway. They took the last three ships those guys left that were in our - the, the - hangar, they took them as evidence…"

"I was hoping we could sell those."

"I knew you would think that…"

"So we're left with what we started with, I guess." Jet manages a slight smile.

"With less, really. If you think about it."

"I don't really want to."

A man in a police uniform enters the hospital room.

"Officer Duplain, Miss Valentine. I need to ask you some questions."

"Now?"

"If you don't mind. I'll wait outside."

"All right." Faye stands to follow, putting a hand on Jet's bed to steady herself. Jet weakly reaches for it, holding her hand in his wounded one, smiling up at her.

"Thanks, Faye."

Without pause she kisses his hand, the touch of her lips on the skin stretched tight across his knuckles like the brush of feathers of a bird; heralding a welcomed dawn, able to sing whenever she pleased.

ISSP REPORT

No. 482042-42-GB

Officers Duplain and Andronovsky

Complainant, one Jet Black, age 36, Ganymede, reported that five unknown persons entered his ship the "Bebop" and opened fire on him. Complainant used deadly force to preserve his life. DBs discovered DOA at 17:55 ST. Case ruled as self-defense.

Addendum: Complainant entered request for reimbursement of funds for damaged bonsai trees. Request was denied.


End file.
